Tag: Italy

On Thursday, the 28 leaders of the European Union gathered in Brussels at their final summit of the year. The EU is in deep crisis. Following the British decision to leave the EU, the election of Donald Trump as US president, and the rise of right-wing nationalist forces in...

Supporters of globalization need to develop a new way to promote open markets that relies on smaller trade deals and helps people who are feeling left out, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.
“I certainly hope there is not a move toward deglobalization,” Lagarde said Friday in an...

Mark Blyth is a Scottish political scientist and a professor of international political economy at Brown University. At an event on November 9 at Brown's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, he spoke about "Global Trumpism" -- a worldwide working-class backlash against harmful macroeconomic trends.
"What we have everywhere...

We don't yet know how the president-elect will behave in office. Meanwhile, the present state of hysteria could make things worse.
“The sky is falling!” exclaimed Chicken Little, in the well-known folk tale, after an acorn fell on the poor fowl’s head, leading to mass hysteria over an imminent apocalypse...

Routs in global bonds and emerging markets intensified, while the dollar climbed with base metals as investors positioned for the wave of fiscal stimulus that Donald Trump has pledged to unleash.
The yield on 30-year Treasuries rose to the highest since January, with last week’s record debt selloff bleeding into...

Greece - Skala Sikaminias is a little beach town on the northern coast of the Greek island of Lesbos. A year ago, rickety wooden boats and dinghies packed with Syrian refugees began plowing into the narrow stretch of beach next to the taverna in the town square. Within days, the flotilla had swelled to vast proportions; as many as 7,000 Syrian refugees were landing on Lesbos every day.

The European Central Bank is becoming dangerously over-extended and the whole euro project is unworkable in its current form, the founding architect of the monetary union has warned.
"One day, the house of cards will collapse,” said Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB's first chief economist and a towering figure in...

Deutsche Bank AG, indicted for colluding with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA to conceal the Italian lender’s losses, mismarked the transaction and dozens of others on its own books, according to an audit commissioned by Germany’s regulator.
Executives at Deutsche Bank arranged 103 similar deals with a total...

ADDIS ABABA, Ethi­o­pia — The sleek, white train glides through the hilly Ethiopian countryside, the first to travel this route in nearly a decade.
The contrast is stark as the new, Chinese-made electric train passes horse-drawn carriages, oxen hauling plows and crowds of curious village children. But soon it crosses...

Deutsche Bank AG was dealt a fresh blow on Saturday when an Italian court charged the company, an employee and five former executives for colluding with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA to falsify the Italian lender’s accounts in 2008.
Michele Faissola, who oversaw global rates at the time,...

What’s going on with the banking industry?
Since the credit crunch in 2008, banks have been struggling to adapt to their new environment. Low interest rates coupled with meagre yields in the financial markets mean banks can generate fewer profits from the deposits they collect, the loans they dole out,...

When makers of American foreign policy dream of an ideal world, they fixate on one word: primacy. It used to be called “full-spectrum dominance.” On the street, it comes out as “Don’t even think about it.” Tough guys in Western movies put it differently: “This town ain’t big enough...

There are some words that make such an unlikely pairing that we find it hard to put them together. Italy and efficiency, for example. Or Bake Off and Channel 4. And 'Germany' and 'banking crisis' is another one. Our image of German banks, and the German economy, as completely rock...

In a fundamental sense the entirety of the five-year-long war over Syria, as well as the entire Arab Spring from Libya to Egypt to Iraq has been about control of hydrocarbon resources—oil and natural gas– and of potential hydrocarbon pipelines to the promising markets of the European Union. Dick...

The McKinsey study Poorer than Their Parents? offers a new perspective on income inequality over the period 2005-2014.
Based on market income from wages and capital, the study shows 81% of US citizens are worse off now than a decade ago. In France the figure is 63%, Italy 97%, and...

Economic sentiment in the 19 countries sharing the euro fell in August to its lowest level since March, a further indication that morale is weakening after Britain voted to leave the European Union.
The European Commission's euro zone Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) fell to 103.5 in August from 104.5 in...

In the two days since the Soros Open Society Foundation hack by the DCLeaks collective, several notable revelations have emerged among the data dump of over 2,500 documents exposing the internal strategy of the organization, which expose some of Soros' tactics to influence and benefit from Europe's refugee crisis,...

In this extract from his new book, the Nobel prize-winning economist argues that if the euro is not radically rethought, Europe could be condemned to decades of broken dreams.
Europe, the source of the Enlightenment, the birthplace of modern science, is in crisis. This part of the world, which hosted...

Italy's third largest bank needs a bailout. What happens next could mean a revolution in Rome – or in Brussels.
Italy's Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena would seem to be the archetype of a good, locally based, non-exploitative financial institution. The oldest bank in the world, with headquarters located...

Fear of terrorism, Muslims, and refugees is driving the parties of the right and left further apart than ever before.
The recent lone-wolf terrorist attacks on the beachfront in Nice and on a train in Bavaria are likely to fuel existing anti-refugee, anti-Muslim fears in a Europe made uneasy by...

Hoarding gold is a centuries-old reaction to times of crisis, and the aftermath of the EU referendum vote is no different.
The yellow metal has soared in value since Britain voted to leave the European Union as investors shoot towards traditional "safe haven" assets. Prices have reached a three-year high as Brexit worries intensify.
An ounce of gold is now worth...

Sanctions are a critical tool in persuading Russia to change its Ukraine policy. But the West’s overreliance on them risks undercutting their long-term effectiveness.
Sanctions have been a central element of U.S. Russia policy following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. They...

Despite causing great controversy in the EU, plans to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline are steadily being implemented, write Agata Loskot-Strachota and Konrad Poplawski of the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Poland. What is more, in May preparations were started for a German land leg of...

Italy's third largest bank by assets, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA is on the death bead. It’s been there since mid-2014.
Italian banks in general have €200 billion in non-performing loans. They have another pile of troubled loans that are late just some of the time.
To address the...

Europe's banking sector is braced for chaos, with Italian giants desperate for a bailout and Germany’s biggest lender deemed a threat to the world economy.
In Italy, politicians begged the European Union for permission to bail out troubled lenders sitting on more than £300bn of bad loans.
Meanwhile, Portugal – long...

Central banks continue to create new money through quantitative easing. But should they?
That’s the question both Harvard economist Terry Burnham and economics correspondent Paul Solman explore in two separate pieces. Below, Terry Burnham warns against quantitative easing. You can read Paul’s take on the issue, “Why the Fed should...

Italy, which failed to gain European Union approval for a bad bank just months ago, is considering ways to inject funds into some of its lenders after the U.K.’s vote to leave the trade bloc sparked a fresh selloff, according to people with knowledge of the talks.
The government is...

Michael Hudson argues that military interventions in the Middle East created refugee streams to Europe that were in turn used by the anti-immigrant right to stir up xenophobia.
Michael Hudson is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The...

This Thursday — just 48 hours from now — the United Kingdom may soon make the greatest monetary blunder since 1925. That’s when Churchill returned sterling to gold at £4.25 per ounce, the pre-war price. Keynes warned Churchill a much higher price was needed to avoid deflation. Churchill ignored...